


you can write it on your arm

by luninosity



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, And Discovering Otherwise, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bookstores, Bucky Barnes Returns, Emotions, M/M, Marriage Proposal, PTSD, Reunions, Standard Winter Soldier Warnings, Steve Believing Bucky To Be Dead, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 07:08:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2803943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a bookstore in D.C., Steve Rogers is signing copies for fans. Bucky Barnes comes to find him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you can write it on your arm

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Waterchuck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Waterchuck/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [you can write it on your arm 你可以写在胳膊上](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4987855) by [blakjc](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blakjc/pseuds/blakjc)



> For the 2014 Stucky Secret Santa Exchange! There did not end up being porn. Perhaps if there is ever a sequel, involving the wedding night...
> 
> As ever, characters belong to Marvel, not me! Only doing this out of affection. 
> 
> Title from My Chemical Romance’s “Summertime”: _how long/ until we find our way/ through the dark and out of harm/ you can run away with me/ any time you want…_

The books loom. No other word for it.    
  
To be fair, there’re probably lots of other words. In a dictionary. Which would be one of those books.   
  
Steve sighs. Puts on his best Captain America smile. Signs the next copy of _Howling_ when it’s set reverently in front of him. The kid smiles back, a boy meeting an idol. Steve loves giving kids that moment of magic, he really truly does. He’s just…   
  
…tired.    
  
A long day. A long, not-yet-over day. Full of book-signings and DVD-signings and camera-flashes and overly solicitous bookshop staff. Everybody at this particular Washington D.C. bookstore has just been thrilled to have the one-and-only Steven Grant Rogers come in for an event. Steve Rogers, Captain America, incredible true story of an actor-turned-soldier, a man who’d been a hero on the silver screen and then put on a uniform and fought for real and been a bona-fide national symbol of loyalty and courage and patriotism.   
  
Steve Rogers and the Howling Commandos. God. His head hurts. He scribbles his name and a ‘Best Wishes!’ across a colorful poster from one of his early war epics. When he’d been an actor. Before—   
  
Before.   
  
After his unit’s tours—Europe, the Middle East, a few extremely classified locations—and after that moment he doesn’t want to think about and thinks about with every inhale and exhale of breath, he’d publicly and with great acclaim retired from active duty, come home, written a best-selling memoir, and gone on to a life of extraordinarily profitable royalties and book tours in glamorous and exotic locations.    
  
These locations just so happen to coincide with known terrorist and weapons-dealer hideouts. Nick Fury’s SHIELD corps isn’t quite CIA and isn’t quite FBI and is incredibly lethal and sneaky and hypervigilant and stuffed to the brim with shiny explosive toys.   
  
SHIELD does good work. Steve does good work. He knows he does. Some days he even feels it.   
  
He smiles at the next woman in line. She smiles back, eyes dark and hopeful and expectant. Her hair’s twisted up in complicated beautiful looping braids, and Steve finds himself distracted by smoky coils and curls, lines and grace. He could try to draw her, he thinks, and he’s aware that he’s getting distracted.   
  
He doesn’t draw much these days. Some. A few illustrations for the book, because his publisher’d told him that this made the story more vivid, more human. A sketch or two of trees, towns, roads. Places they’d been.   
  
He’d refused to draw people. All the faces turn into one face, anyway.   
  
Bucky, he thinks, and he signs another book copy, and poses for a phone snapshot with a boy and his mother. Oh, Bucky.   
  
“It must’ve been so hard,” says a voice.   
  
Steve jumps, because even national heroes jump when fans read their minds, and smacks his knee rather painfully on the signing table, and then tries to apologize for being startled, which doesn’t work because the girl’s apologizing for having startled _him_ , and they end up in a mutual state of flustered commiseration.   
  
“Um,” Steve says, “sorry again,” and takes her book.   
  
“No,” she says, “my fault. You probably don’t want to talk about it. But I just wanted to say…I, um, I lost my girlfriend last year, she was in the army, and the way you write about it here—about him, um, Bucky Barnes…” She flushes pink and pretty. Her eyes’re sad, but warm, and Steve thinks of drawing her too, drawing her as a superhero, walking ahead through sunlight, carrying a shield. “I just, um. You helped—it helped knowing someone else gets it, y’know? How that feels. And you had to keep fighting. I can’t imagine how you went on.”   
  
“We had a mission.” Not a mechanical answer, never that, but years later the pain’s old and familiar, less a claw in the gut and more of an unhealed broken bone in the rain. “We kept going. Bucky would’ve wanted that.”   
  
“It isn’t fair,” she says. “You joined the army to find him. Everything you had, and you only had those few months…”   
  
“It’s never fair,” Steve says steadily. Jagged bone-ends, scraping, catching. Bucky’d been everything. And Bucky’d died, slipping out of Steve’s grasp on a covert mission in the Alps, and Steve had moved heaven and earth to go back and look for his body later, too much later, after the success of that mission, and there’d been no body, and Steve had stared stupidly at empty snow and felt ice wrap itself around his heart.   
  
“Well,” she says, “I’m sorry, and thank you for—for being so truthful, thank you for—” and she pats his arm and darts away.   
  
Beside Steve’s chair, Natasha pops bubblegum, which means she wants to be noticed. Steve wonders how long she’s been standing there _un_ noticed. Natasha’s got a lot of skills.   
  
Currently she’s pretending to be Steve’s assistant for this book tour. Yesterday she’d been interrogating an arms dealer in an abandoned warehouse. Steve eyes her stylish heels. She’s managed to get the blood off completely. Of course she has.   
  
She doesn’t say anything, but her eyes ask: need some air?   
  
I’m fine, Steve answers silently, wearily, and keeps up his cover. A bookstore employee brings him coffee, which he drinks automatically and then regrets because it’s far too sweet. The mission’s over, has been over since last night, all intel acquired; today’s just ensuring that nobody connects the famous Captain America and his bestselling memoir with clandestine operations.   
  
He takes another sip of coffee. The sugary taste lingers on his tongue. Bucky would’ve loved it. Bucky’d always loved sensual indulgences: nice clothes, good scotch, the imprint of Steve’s mouth leaving hedonistic nips and bruises across his skin every chance they got or took or made.    
  
That’d never been often enough. Never enough time. Never enough breathing room. Never, never, never.   
  
James Buchanan Barnes had been his childhood best friend, and Steve’d frequently wondered why, why a science-geek rock-star-handsome generous-hearted boy’d wanted to step in and stand beside a tiny sickly angry punk kid who’d been getting his ass kicked by the biggest bully in third grade. He’d even asked once, years after that tumultuous first meeting. He’d been sick for the fifth time in a month, coughing his lungs out while Bucky skipped their first-ever high-school homecoming game and dance to sit by his bed. He’d been angry and frustrated and hating the fact that life wasn’t fair and would never be fair, and he’d told Bucky to go, because why the hell was Bucky here wasting his time, Bucky deserved to dance with girls and have a fucking life—   
  
Bucky’d just rolled his eyes and gotten up and left the room, and Steve had instantly panicked because Bucky’d left, and he’d felt small and terrible and sick in a way that had nothing at all to do with weak lungs; he’d told Bucky to leave and Bucky’d _left_ and taken all the color in the world with him, and Steve Rogers was in love with Bucky Barnes and Bucky had walked away because Steve had told him to—   
  
His eyes had been getting hot, and he’d strangled back tears so hard he’d started coughing again, at which point Bucky’d come running back in with instant chicken noodle soup fresh from the microwave and demanded, “You idiot, did you try to get up, don’t get up!” and Steve had breathed in the scent of chicken broth and been in love.   
  
He’s been in love with Bucky Barnes for years. He always will be. No one else, not for him.   
  
Bucky’d joined the army because while he had good grades and a lot of brains he also had a miniature horde of siblings to support and not much money, and he’d said, smiling, meeting Steve’s eyes over a smaller curly-haired toddler-Barnes head, “hey, it’ll be fine, it’s one tour, I’ll come back, and the army’ll pay for my college after that, hell, maybe even grad school, engineering, physics, who knows, Stevie, we can do anything…”   
  
Bucky’d joined the 107th because his father had too, once upon a time. Steve, scrawny and perpetually ill and already nevertheless getting the occasional modeling or acting job—because he supposedly had an interesting face, whatever _that_ meant—for side money, had sworn up and down that if Bucky didn’t come back Steve would come over there and personally drag his ass back home.   
  
That story’s in the book. He’d had to stop and throw up halfway through writing it down.    
  
He’d saved Bucky once. Had walked off the set of a World War Two epic motion picture and—after quite a lot of arguments with bristling U.S. Army officers—into a neo-Nazi extremist stronghold; had pulled Bucky from an experimental-drug testing table and led the ragged cheering remnants of the test subjects to freedom.   
  
He guesses maybe he only gets that once. More than most people ever do, and he’s lucky, they were lucky, they got one extra round.   
  
It’s still not fucking fair. Not balanced, not with how many times Bucky’d saved him. Hence the need to stop writing and sit on the cold tile of his bathroom floor, shaking, punching holes into his cabinets with the hand that couldn’t hold on the second time Bucky’d needed him. All his newfound muscles, all his newfound strength, and he couldn’t—   
  
Bucky would’ve kicked his ass for hurting himself, and then thrown him into bed and brought him wonderful soup. Bucky would’ve kissed him the way Steve had once kissed those curving lips under a snowfall in a sparkling café-lined street in France, awed and astonished and wholehearted and needing to taste him and drink him in and memorize the sounds and scent and feel of him, to keep those sensations tattooed like a love-letter along his bones and heart and soul. Bucky’d been surprised when Steve had kissed him, Steve remembers, but had opened right up and kissed back, letting Steve take everything, anything Steve wanted or needed from him, a kiss like an unvoiced promise of forever.    
  
Bucky would’ve been right here beside him saving the world. And Bucky can’t do any of those things.   
  
He’d thought they’d have time. He’d thought he’d have time to find the words and the courage for the words. They’d been on the tip of his tongue. Like an outflung hand, he’d not grasped them quick enough.    
  
Bucky Barnes died without knowing that Steve Rogers loved him, _loves_ him, and Steve can never make that right, because snow and trains and sunbeams falling like grief through a windowpane and grey clouds gathering over a Washington D.C. bookshop are all inexorably unfair.   
  
A notebook lands on his signing table.   
  
He’s picked up his pen on reflex, he’s flipped to the first page, he’s about to ask what name—   
  
The first page is blank. The notebook is blank.   
  
The notebook is soft and leather and quietly expensive, with pages that rustle like satin to his touch. The notebook’s pocket-sized for ease of carrying around, and waterproof in case Steve wants to take it to a park on a rainy day, and the blank creamy spaces make his fingers itch to create, to take up the invitation with liquid pen-ink or pencil-swoops, swirling fantastical colors. The notebook’s perfect.   
  
He looks up. No one’s in front of the table.   
  
The girl who’s technically next in line, clutching her copy of _Howling_ , shrugs bewilderedly. “Not mine.”   
  
“Did you see where it came from?”   
  
Another shrug. “I don’t know, y’know, one sec it wasn’t there and then it was, and, like, that’s totally cutting in line, which is, like, so not cool. Captain America’d never cut in line.”   
  
“He might,” Steve says. “If it was important.” She doesn’t know him. She knows Captain America. The persona. The movie-star role.   
  
The person who’d left the notebook knows Steve Rogers.    
  
He turns, out of instinct, out of some whisper-sense at his left shoulder.   
  
A baseball cap. A flicker of dark clothing. Evanescent. A shadow.   
  
But—   
  
But he _knows_ that shadow, that flicker. Even under careless bookstore lights, even years later, even when the figure moves like a feral alley cat instead of a bright-eyed world-ahead-of-him long-legged boy or, later, a deadly crack shot with a sniper’s smile and an eye to keeping Steve’s back safe always—   
  
“Excuse me,” Steve forces out, “air—” and ignores all the puzzled stares and runs. Behind him, Natasha picks up the notebook; she’ll keep it for him, he knows, and he doesn’t glance back.   
  
The figure’s fast. So’s Steve. They end up in the back parking lot, where delivery trucks pull in behind the store, where inventory arrives, where books come to be sold and find a home. The concrete’s cracked and worn under Steve’s boots.   
  
The figure’s covered up. Jacket, baseball cap, long hair, gloves. The air’s brittle and fragile, waiting to snap; but Steve feels flushed all over, hot and cold and dizzy with the impact.   
  
He says, “Bucky.” And Bucky Barnes freezes in his tracks, captured by his name in the winter sundown.   
  
“It _is_ you,” Steve says, “oh God, oh fuck, how is it, how are you even, never mind, Bucky—”   
  
“You left me the notebook,” Steve says. “You—”   
  
“Bucky,” Steve says. Or maybe whispers. Or maybe weeps. “Bucky.”   
  
“I…” Bucky hesitates. The light from the back door, not properly closed, falls over his face. It’s busy illuminating grey pavement and stumbling words. “I just wanted to—to see if you would take it. You weren’t supposed to see me.”   
  
Steve’s poor overworked heart threatens that it can’t take any more emotions. Steve ignores it. He’s stubborn that way. “Bucky—it’s beautiful, thank you, I—why can’t I see you? I’m seeing you now.”   
  
Bucky shakes his head, and breathes out in what’s not a laugh, and half-turns. Poised to run, to vanish, to evaporate like dying snow.   
  
Steve sprints the two steps to his side. Bucky takes a step back. Steve takes a step forward.   
  
Bucky stares at him from beneath the baseball cap, and then essays two more steps, walking backwards this time.   
  
Steve takes the matching steps. Crosses his arms.   
  
“So…” Bucky says.    
  
“Nope,” Steve says, “you’re stuck with me.”   
  
A ghost of a smile, and oh how appropriate that metaphor is, haunts Bucky’s face. “Same as always, then?”   
  
“Same as always,” Steve agrees, and then pauses. Bucky’s question had been…less rhetorical than he’d first thought. “Tell me what you meant. About not seeing you.”   
  
“You don’t…” Bucky huffs, brief and humorless as icicles. “Just wanted to see you. You look good, Steve. So damn good.”   
  
“So do you.” Steve means it. Bucky’s thin and pale and moves as if he’s expecting the air to attack, but he’s alive, and so: the entire universe cheers.    
  
Bucky says, “I’m just a ghost, Stevie,” too uncanny an echo of that earlier thought; but he doesn’t move.   
  
Steve takes a step closer. They’re nearly touching. A breath away.   
  
“If you’re a ghost,” Steve says, “I’m not scared.”   
  
Bucky snorts. “You? Scared? Of anything?”   
  
“I’ve been scared,” Steve tells him, tells this gift, tells this miracle with winter-blue eyes, “every night. Every night I dream about saving you, I dream about going back for you, I dream about fucking _finding_ you, and then I wake up, and I don’t know how I’m gonna make it to morning. I always told you I was never scared of anything, and I was always fuckin’ petrified of losing you, and I love you, I didn’t say it when you were alive and I’m sayin’ it now, I love you, I love you.”   
  
Bucky half-smiles again, fleeting but somehow more tangible. “Provin’ my point about you and the not bein’ scared.”   
  
“Scared you’re gonna leave,” Steve says, “Bucky, please.” And he holds out a hand, and then stops, hovering, caught between gesture and comprehension that any reaching-out might be too much.   
  
Bucky looks at the hand. “Stevie…”   
  
“You don’t have to love me back.” Desperate, fumbling, begging. “But—I thought you were—just stay, just one minute, just—let me follow you.”   
  
“Used to be my job.” Bucky’s still gazing at Steve’s hand. “Following you. You said you love me.”   
  
“Yeah, Buck. I do. I—do you want me to apologize for saying it?” He can’t apologize for feeling it. “I’m sorry.”   
  
“I don’t remember a lot.” Bucky looks down at his scuffed boots, back at Steve’s hand, up at the sky. Haphazard rain’s finally beginning to fall. More a fine mist than anything else, it settles on Bucky’s eyelashes and catches in his half-hearted beard-stubble and spills silver in his hair. “I remembered you loved to draw.”   
  
“You always knew me,” Steve whispers. “You know me.”   
  
And Bucky takes a breath, lets it out, looks him head-on. “You don’t know me. Not anymore.”   
  
“I do.”   
  
“Stevie…” Exasperation; but it’s fond exasperation, like the thawing of glaciers into long-awaited spring. “Steve, I was a POW for years, I was brainwashed, I was used as an assassin, I’ve got nightmares that make other nightmares scream, I lost an arm, I’ve got a shiny new StarkTech prosthesis because I volunteered for the experimental version because why not, and I’m technically officially dead and unofficially responsible for a hell of a lot of treasonous acts despite legal fuckin’ loopholes about sanity. They didn’t tell you I was alive for fucking _excellent_ reasons. By the time Phil Coulson’s team got me out of Russia last year, there wasn’t much left. You don’t want me. You don’t want to see me.”   
  
“You brought me a notebook,” Steve says. Inarguable, self-evident, simple truth. Paper and certainty. And no, he’s not scared. No matter how many reasons Bucky throws at him. They both know why Bucky’s trying and they both know the only reply Steve will ever give to _that_.   
  
“I…couldn’t not see you. Once. I snuck out of a SHIELD holding facility in New York to come down here. They’re probably sending a strike team right now. I’m incredibly dangerous.”   
  
“I love you.”   
  
“Fuck you and your stupid reckless heart,” Bucky says, “I love you, too, I always have,” and takes Steve’s hand.   
  
“So,” Steve says. Their fingers twine together. It’s not the same fit Steve remembers, clumsy with disguising gloves and lost time, but it is a fit. It works. “Assassin?”   
  
“So,” Bucky says back. “Secret agent?”   
  
“Hey, you think if we get you declared alive again,” Steve suggests, not asking how Bucky knows about that particular highly classified job detail, “we can get married?”    
  
“My memory comes and goes,” Bucky tells him, “and I’m not real good about bein’ touched.”   
  
“I get depressive episodes,” Steve retorts, “I can never save the world _enough_ , and you’re holding my hand. You didn’t say no. Marry me.”   
  
Bucky starts laughing again, and shrugs half-helplessly as the rain erupts in full-fledged joy to drench their hair and their shoulders and the giddy concrete parking lot; Bucky holds Steve’s hand and says, “Christ, Stevie, this is crazy, you’re crazy and I’m crazy and yeah, of course yes, fuck yes.”


End file.
